Enjoyment of "Autumn in New York" depends to a certain degree on a viewer's tolerance for a mood of luxurious melancholy. At 105 minutes, it becomes too much of an indulgence in the new Winona Ryder-Richard Gere romantic drama, which opened yesterday without advance screenings for the press.

Gere, a professional charmer who might be too aware of it, also plays one, as Will Keane, the owner of a fashionable New York restaurant. Ryder is Charlotte, a young designer at his restaurant to celebrate a birthday that, the audience soon learns, might be her last.

"Autumn in New York" was directed by Joan Chen, and it cannot help but be a letdown after the desolate beauty of her extraordinary "Xiu-Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl." That 1998 film was a courageous one, both in the difficulties of its making, on the China-Tibet border, and in its bleak, moving drama.

At first, "Autumn in New York" seems to be about a love affair between a young woman and a man old enough to be her father, a subject that has possibilities. Age turns out to be no problem, however, and the subject is dropped. Then it becomes a story about a womanizer's love affair with a

young woman who may not have long to live, a subject with fewer possibilities stretched out beyond a viewer's patience.

Will is 48 and Charlotte is in her early 20s, but Gere, who is 50, does not look too old for Ryder, 28. They look like a very attractive couple. They look, in fact, like a couple of beautifully groomed Hollywood stars.

For a while, the audience is left to wonder if Will might be her father -- it turns out he had some kind of relationship with her mother. It does plant the idea for the most interesting development in the film and a nice performance by Vera Farmiga ("Return to Paradise") as a mysterious young woman.

If Ryder appears to be trying too hard to be cute, it may be a cover for Charlotte's awareness that time is short. At any rate, Ryder can be quite affecting when she drops the facade.

Gere, in contrast, is better in the early going, when Will must be smooth with other people and comfortable with himself. Self-recrimination does not sit well with Gere.

Former Broadway musical star Elaine Stritch plays Charlotte's grandmother, a tough old bird with a whiskey tenor. Mary Beth Hurt gives a neat spin to the thankless assignment of playing a doctor who must drop in from time to time with medical reports. Her response when asked the efficacy of Eastern or alternative therapy is sharp and succinct.

The final third of "Autumn in New York" takes on a tone of morbid preoccupation that not only is the opposite of dramatic, it is also one of the moods people go to the movies to escape.

Will's overdecorated Manhattan apartment could charitably be taken as a reflection of his character, but the film seems a little too fascinated with the luxuries of the rich.

There is a costume party for which Gere dons dalmatian ears and nose, someone's idea of cute. Charlotte's design work offers a subject of continuing curiosity.

There is a pretentiously decorated cake at her birthday party, and whether or not she is supposed to have decorated it, it is of a piece with her other creations, which are given to wires, feathers and beads. She has a ungainly wrap with dangling thingamajigs and a hat that looks like a bug's antennae.

A bead hanging, however, does provide the film's most effective moment near the end, when Will brushes past, and it sounds like shattering glass.